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Author Topic: Separate combat and campaign skill points  (Read 14230 times)

montaropdf

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #15 on: November 01, 2017, 02:28:10 PM »

My two cents, why not delegating some skills to officers dedicated to specific aspects of the game like:

- Engeneer officer, for everything regarding, repair, salvage, ship recovery, fuel consuption, ...
- Scientific officer, for surveying, mainly

In my view our character is an admiral or a fleet commander, so there is surely a team of officer under his command that takes responsibility for some specific duty. Our character could have a few skills in those area, just to add a small bonus to the skill of the dedicated officer.

Those officers can gain skills through action, but also through training in academy, for example.

Another aspect could be to change the mechanic of survey. Instead of requirering a certain level to be able to survey, it could be better to have a certain level of failure at that task. When failing, a part of the machinery and/or crew is lost. That allows to perform survey on any kind of planet, even at low level, but, will make it harder to players that don't concentrate on that kind of stuff, without preventing them from performing that kind of tasks.
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Shrugger

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #16 on: November 04, 2017, 10:34:09 AM »

Specialised non-combat officers seems ideal.

That way, campaign skills can be optionally levelled apart from the player character, but without needing to rebalance the whole skill tree.

There would need to be some way to keep them in danger, though - some way to lose them. Suggestions thereto:
1) Make it mandatory for all officers, without exception, to ride on a ship - even if only as passengers*. That way, they can always be lost in combat.
2) Let them gain XP only from difficult industry operations with a risk of accidents, and let those accidents have a chance of killing them.
*) This would also let the player character ride on the flagship as a passenger while a combat-specialised officer provides his bonuses.

This way, you can have your cake and eat it - but you need to train up the relevant officers to cover your weaknesses.

Shoot me down, gents.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #17 on: November 04, 2017, 05:01:22 PM »

Another idea I had: instead of changing the skill system to make sure that the player can get access to all of the necessary skills, you could create other ways of gaining the perks you want besides skills. The idea I had in mind was utility ships. This is sort of how salvage rigs would work if they weren't dependent on skills also. The idea is that if you have a few salvage rigs, then you don't need salvage skills. You could just extend this to other mechanics. Have ship that increases the speed of all other ships in the fleet, but has minimal combat utility. A range boosting ship, deployment cost reducing ship, fuel cost reducing etc. Then you can not take certain skills and still have the effects you want, by paying in fleet space and supplies instead of skill points.

You could also use hull mods in a similar way, but I think that has a different effect, since you are reducing the combat effectiveness of the individual ships.

I think you would want the skills to be stronger so that your skill choice governs your strongest attributes. There might be some balance concerns making sure the utility ships are good enough to justify their use without having them overshadow the skills. You also would need to make sure that skills and utility ships don't stack in a way that is unbalanced.

You could also have combat utility ships that buff in combat stats of nearby ships (flux capacity, range, shield efficiency, etc...). These could replace combat skills in some instances, but again, you would have to balance carefully with skills and officers. That could make for some very interesting interactions, where you might want to take out support ships first to make other fights more feasible, it would make combat more strategic/tactical.
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Megas

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #18 on: November 06, 2017, 09:01:33 AM »

Hauling four rigs is a noticeable drawback when there is a fleet size limit of 30 ships.  It would be nice if unskilled characters can use rigs instead of skills to salvage stuff while those with skills do not need rigs to salvage and can bring more combat ships in place of unnecessary rigs or bring fewer ships for either less fleet maintenance and/or more room for more recovered ships.  Currently, rigs are useless for anyone without Salvaging 2 or 3.

Quote
This way, you can have your cake and eat it - but you need to train up the relevant officers to cover your weaknesses.

Shoot me down, gents.
It would probably make Officer Management one of the most powerful and mandatory skills in the game.  Currently, it is very good, but with only combat stuff, it is limited by how many ships you can cram into battle.  (For someone favoring big ships and playing with default battle map size, four officers might be enough.)  If officers can have campaign stuff, then Officer Management 3 would be as much if not more than of a no-brainer as Loadout Design 3.

If officers can have campaign skills, then Officer Management either needs to be removed and everyone gets the same max number of officers (or replace empty Leadership aptitude with Officer Management), just as it was done for ships.

In earlier versions, Leadership affected how many ships (and crew) a player could manage (without Leadership, you could not manage a battleship without CR penalties), and encouraged players who did not want Leadership to solo entire fleets with one overpowered ship.  Then, that was done away with and everyone has the same limit of ships.
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Shrugger

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #19 on: November 07, 2017, 10:16:39 PM »

How about instead of a fixed officer limit, you get increasing drawbacks for having too many officers?
Say, you get higher base command points (since you're likely dealing with more ships) but slower regeneration.

Officer Management could then reduce these negative effects, by perhaps up to 50%.
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Null Ganymede

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #20 on: February 12, 2018, 02:21:22 AM »

As a new player, I really enjoy the choices the skill system forces you to make. Some combinations enable entire new play styles, or change a hull from "meh" to "omg".

The permanence of skill choices is kind of tough, though. It feels like you need to have a good idea of your endgame, along with the early/mid game crutches you need to get there. And that might be fine for veteran players or roguelikes with fast re-play, but is rough on beginners and games with lots of investment. It's also hard to adapt to emergent behavior, like interesting flagships being salvaged or fleet composition trending towards something you didn't plan for.

I've been solving the problem with judicious cheating as I learn the ropes, but an in-game alternative would be cool. Re-spec at the cost of dropping down to level 1? (Old-school MUD "remort" system? Heavy combat maxes out the player at 40 quite quickly.)
« Last Edit: February 12, 2018, 02:53:53 AM by Null Ganymede »
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TaLaR

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #21 on: February 12, 2018, 02:57:04 AM »

I've been solving the problem with judicious cheating but an in-game alternative would be cool. Re-spec at the cost of dropping down to level 1? (Old-school MUD "remort" system? Heavy combat maxes out the player at 40 quite quickly.)

This makes transition from leveling build (focus on money-gen and fast payoff skills like personal combat) to final build (maxed fleet power) obvious must. As you said yourself, re-leveling won't even take much time.
If you can be sure (through save-loading) to never lose a ship, you can even outfit a stockpile of ships and then reset +OP/Max vents skills in tech.

Of course current situation is also problematic: either you specialize in carriers exclusively or can't reasonably pilot them. To lesser extent similar choice is present between high-tech (can ignore armor skills to some extent) and low-tech (armor skills are more important). So you are locked into piloting certain kind of ships for whole campaign (you want to be effective at it, right?).
You are also locked in terms of overall fleet composition - it depends on fleet-wide skill choices and officers (temperaments and skills).
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Kirschbra

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #22 on: February 12, 2018, 10:18:37 AM »

Personally I don't like the idea that I can only have some of the skills, and as someone mentioned earlier exp gain is way to high,  what I do is go in and edit the max level so that I can eventually use all the skills, and it's more a choice of what do I want to get first, and then I turn experience gain down by 80% so I'm leveling 5 times slower, under regular settings sometimes you level up multiple times from one battle, i had a battle that I leveled up 5 times once and I barely fired any shots, i just kinda joined in on a huge battle.  I'm wondering if exp gain is just set so high because we are still in alpha and alex wants everyone to level fast for reporting reasons.  makes sense in a testing phase of the game.

But yea I hate the idea of having to split between personal skills, fleet skills and industry skills, I want all the skills
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Megas

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #23 on: February 12, 2018, 12:16:22 PM »

If the game is long enough, I do not want to be locked into a single trick.  A coffeebreak game like DoomRL/DRL (aside from Ao100/Ao666 games), I do not mind playing a specialist one-trick pony because the game will end soon.  For a longer game, like Starsector, I want to be either a jack-of-all-trades that can do many things competently or a master-of-all that can do everything well.  I dislike playing a specialist that can do only one thing well and is practically married to a particular ship.

I do not like playing a carrier specialist because that means my flagship will likely be Drover, Heron, or Astral, and I need to play them like the Spathi Eluder in Star Control 2.  Run, run away with maximum speed while fighters kill everything, and I probably need to do it alone (i.e., chain-flagships) because AI carriers with fighters but no bombers do not use fighters to attack.

Older versions, I could use whatever I wanted.  Today, some skill choices turn the player into a one-trick pony and might marry them to a single ship type or two.  The game is not short enough for one-trick ponies to be enjoyable.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #24 on: February 12, 2018, 05:42:44 PM »

Personally I don't like the idea that I can only have some of the skills, and as someone mentioned earlier exp gain is way to high,  what I do is go in and edit the max level so that I can eventually use all the skills, and it's more a choice of what do I want to get first, and then I turn experience gain down by 80% so I'm leveling 5 times slower, under regular settings sometimes you level up multiple times from one battle, i had a battle that I leveled up 5 times once and I barely fired any shots, i just kinda joined in on a huge battle.  I'm wondering if exp gain is just set so high because we are still in alpha and alex wants everyone to level fast for reporting reasons.  makes sense in a testing phase of the game.

But yea I hate the idea of having to split between personal skills, fleet skills and industry skills, I want all the skills
After level 40, the current max level, the exp gains to level up ramp up QUICK
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TaLaR

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #25 on: February 12, 2018, 06:20:06 PM »

Now that I think of it, if we had separate combat and campaign(and fleetwide) skill points, having respec for combat part only wouldn't even be a problem. There are no remaining effects like ships with more OP than possible skill-less, etc that are typical for campaign skills.
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Goumindong

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #26 on: February 12, 2018, 07:06:53 PM »

You can do this yourself with the console and I think it makes the game a lot better.

Give yourself 4 skillpoints and put one into each of the base skills. At level 15 and 30 do it again. When you level up place skillpoints in order. Combat then leadership then technology then industry. You will end up with 10 in each and 12 in Combat and Leadership with a max of 11 skils at rank 3.
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FreedomFighter

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #27 on: February 12, 2018, 11:43:53 PM »

After level 40, the current max level, the exp gains to level up ramp up QUICK

Like Heavy Falcon QUICK! Someone made a custom script so it scale at reasonable level. If anyone want, go grab it here
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12302.0
If you unlocked the max level (cap 97) then you would need around 40m exp to max it out with this script.
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Megas

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #28 on: February 13, 2018, 04:38:36 PM »

During 0.7.x, I found leveling beyond 50 to be slow, although it was possible to reach 70+ if you were really determined.
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Sarissofoi

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Re: Separate combat and campaign skill points
« Reply #29 on: April 16, 2018, 10:18:49 AM »

Yeah the attitude points feel like total waste.
As a rather not skilled layer I always find global skills irresistible or just QoL needed which make my combat experiences even more sad.
I especially do not get why Surveying or Salvaging isn't more tied with the fleet(ships, mods, captains personal support skills) than with player single skill.
OK I get it why now but hope it change.

Actually I am quite opposed fleet skills as they are.
I mean
>surveying, bring exploration ship with support mods with captains that have support skills for that
>salvaging, same ships, mods captain with support skills(put difficulty rating on most ships especially bigger or high tech but with salvaging rating for fleet that allow better salvaging ships(less dmods, possibility to salvage more ships even more damaged(more dmods obviously) etc
>fleet repairs
>captain support skills or mods for less supplies, faster recovery , less fuel usage instead of fleet skills

Etc. Now its too restrictive.
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